chapter 0

"Hey!" "Hey You!"

"Hey!, I'm talkin' to you, punk." You knew Joe was serious whenever he actually said "you" and not his normal "ya".

Joe Venitto was an old school cop who hadn't kept up with the times. He thought you could just yell and everyone would turn around to see who was yellin'. But with just about everyone wearing earphones and iPods, nobody heard him.

So he actually had to run up and tap the young man on the shoulder to get his attention. The kid turned around in disgust with a look of "who would dare touch me", but upon seeing the blue and gold of Boston's finest his look changed to one of "oh, no, what did I do now".

Joe, huffing and puffing from the hundred foot run, eyes bulged and darting, looked like he was going to have a coronary right in front of the poor kid. "Hey kid, didn't you know there's a city ordanance that you've got to take headphones or earphones out when crossing the street?" Having caught his breath Joe put his best intimidator look back on for the befuddled kid. "What? You gotta' be kiddin', you're kiddin', right?" "Hey, did Tommy set up up to dis?" Joe slowly shook his head side to side. "Look kid, I tell ya what. I'm feelin' good today so I won't write ya up. But if I see ya doin' it again, I'll throw da' book at ya."

So the kid nodded his agreement, said "yes sir", and turned to resume whatever he was doing before Joe injected himself into his life.

Joe turned with a grin feeling like he was one tough dude who was going to teach this younger generation how to respect the system he was dedicated to upholding. He sucked in his substantial gut, or "sixpack" as he liked to brag to his buddies, and started to walk down the street towards his favorite street vendor. The run had gotten him worked up and a nice cold Diet Coke would hit the spot about now.

Professor Norbert Abernathy, or Pro Abe as his grad students affectionately called him, had just finished his lecture and was dealing with the normal student queries and excuses cloaked in sincerely posed questions that only someone as smart as Norb could tell was actually demonstrating how little they knew.

"Pro Abe!" Varodi was Norb's newest Post-Doctoral assistant. Norb looked Varodi's way his eyebrows up noting his attention.

"We've got something you've got to see." Varodi was not prone to such declarations, normally a reserved "super geek" as his other students called him. So Norb knew this was something worthy of walking out right in the middle of the lowly undergrad whining.

Having made it into the hallway, which had mostly cleared of student life and was exceedingly quiet Norbert noted, Norb asked Varodi to explain himself.

"Well Pro Abe, we were running a simple startup test of the bubble chamber for the Lab, and something happended that we could not explain." The Lab was the word his students used as code for upper class particle Physics Lab. Norb's eyebrow went up since Varodi stating there was something that could not be explained was something of a suprise in itself. Varodi was widely regarded as one of the five brightest new PhD's in the world of Particle Physics, coming to Norb straight from Princeton's Applied Physics Lab, so for him to state there was something "we" could not explain was cause for concern.

"Well Varodi we very well can't have mysteries in the Universe can we? Hummmm?" Norb smiled broadly to disarm Varodi's apprehension and insecurity that there was something he did not know. Varodi came from a culture where you were indebted to your seniors, especially one who was clearly your intellectual superior, and to present yourself as weak to your "leader" could lead to your dismissal as an "inferior"; the most ugly of adjectives to be used to a academician-in-training.

As they entered the lab it was dead quiet, all the undergrads had left for "liquid refreshment", so they could review the results in peace and quiet.

"Look here Pro Abe, see this one trace", pointing to the gentle arc of small bubbles produced by the motion of a subatomic particle in water the fragments from a horrendously powerful impact that a proton makes with a nucleus.

"It should be here, but it suddenly disappears. I've checked and rechecked the system. Everything checks out." Varodi, frustrated, declared.

"Hummmm... I trust you Varodi, what do you make of it?" Norb probed his junior seriously now. Norb also saw that eveything was in order except for that little disappearing bubble trace.

"Well Pro Abe I've got some experiments I'd like to run to first verify everything's OK in the accelerator and bubble chamber, then I'll do some calc's on the trace and get back to you."

Norb knew this meant unstopped activity from Varodi until everything was completed. Sleep, food, sometimes even excretive functions took a back seat to experiments. Varodi's singular focus was commendable albeit slightly over-the-top in Norb's opinion.

"That's fine Varodi, but don't forget you have a wife and baby who need you more than I need to know the reason for disappearing bubbles. So if it takes a little longer nobody but us will know." Smiling, Norb brought Varodi back to reality as he sheepishly smiled his acknowledgement.

Norb left the lab wondering what Varodi would find...

Late Breaking News! I could be outta here anytime

"Exact teleportation was thought to be impossible," Charles H. Bennett of IBM Research, part of the team that first discovered "quantum teleportation," told CNN. "Now, however, it is known to be possible."

Further, adds Bennett;

"In fact it is simpler than it sounds. What you have to note is that in this sort of experiment the atom itself is not teleported, but rather the delicate quantum information contained in the atom. In effect you are disembodying the complete quantum state of one atom and reincarnating it in another atom of the same sort."

How is this "quantum teleportation" actually achieved? The process relies upon something called "Quantum Entanglement," a fiendishly counter-intuitive phenomenon that Einstein described as "spukhafte Fernwirkung" or "spooky action at a distance." Basically it involves two separate particles behaving as if they were essentially one and the same, even though they are separated by a great distance. Changes to one particle will be mirrored in the other. Using this phenomenon physicists have been able to transfer -- or in effect teleport -- the properties of one particle to another, in the case of atoms over a distance of about half a meter, in the case of photons over tens of kilometers.

Bennett believes that, in principle at least, it is perfectly feasible to teleport humans without violating any of the fundamental laws of physics. Not only that, but, also in principle, it could be done without resorting to the complexities of quantum entanglement. "Quantum entanglement is valuable in transmitting particles such as atoms and photons where the most delicate properties are significant and where simple approximation is not enough," he explains.
"Teleporting a person, on the other hand, would not require reproducing the quantum state anything like as exactly." Everything we know about biology and how molecules fit together to produce a living being, including the brain, indicates that creating some level of approximation would give you a real person who was a serviceable replica of the original in terms of looking the same and thinking the same thoughts, without necessarily being a perfect quantum replica.
"The teleported person would end up slightly different, but not in a biologically important way."
The implication of this is that you could scan a person using some advanced form of the technology used to perform MRI scans, and transmit that scanned information somewhere else -- using normal electrical or sound signals -- where it would then be reassembled into an approximation of the original. "It's the same principle as a fax machine," says Bennett. "When you fax something what comes out the other end obviously looks like the original and contains the same information. It's not the same paper, however, or the same type of ink. "It's the same, but not the same. "We already have three-dimensional fax machines, so the basic theory is there." What actually happens to the original person when their bio-molecular details are "faxed" somewhere else, and whether your average person on the street would be happy to be reassembled as a similar but at the same time slightly different average person on the street, are, thinks Bennett, moot points. With each human being made up of trillions upon trillions of atoms -- 10 to the power of 28 to be precise -- the technology to perform a sufficiently accurate scan to produce even the most basic approximation of a living person does not exist, and probably never will. "What might be possible in theory is, from a technological point of view, blatantly impossible," he says. "If you consider all the atoms in a person, and the fact that in the scan you would have to locate all those atoms to within a nanometer of each other, and then have some machine capable of translating that information into DNA, water, fat, protein etc. -- it's just silly to think about."

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Well, well, well...

I'm giddy over the endless comments on this one.

But where to start?

Any ideas?

Geometric Progression is the path to happiness

Have you heard people state that the world is becoming an increasingly complex place to live? I can unequivocally confirm that people are correct! In the beginning, God only had one rule, ONE Rule! He told Adam, "Yo Adam! you and your girlfriend can do anything you want, just don't eat fruit from one tree." That's it, nothing about maybe they should get some clothes on, or be discreet about what they do all day, or where they do it, nothin'. So what does Adam and his main squeeze do? Exactly what they were just asked not to do of course! So then they get booted out, and the world goes crazy with no rules until they almost get snuffed out completely. So then God tries ten rules, you know, to see how people like the idea. People like the idea so much, they make even more rules, so many so that they then have to make rules to get around all the other rules. This time, instead of creating an ember out of the earth, or sending some fire breathing dragon, or making the earth a snowball, or a giant waterpark, or a black hole, He sends Jesus to 'splain what He was trying to get at with the original ten rules. In fact Jesus dumbs it down for everyone to only two rules, just two; Love God with all you've got, and love everyone else like you take care of yourself. The idea took a little while to catch on, but finally people seemed to like Jesus' idea. In fact, after a while folks thought it might help if they 'splained what Jesus meant, so they kind of embellished and expanded the original two rules; you know, to help people get the drift.

Well, the Founding Fathers of what would come to be known as The United States of America had heard about the original one rule, the ten rules, and also the two rules after that. So, they thought three rules would be a nice compromise. A committee was formed to decide on what three rules to use. Being the forward thinking men they were, they ignored those other rules and made up some new ones they thought would be kinda nifty. You might have heard of these new rules, pursue life, pursue liberty, pursue happiness. Well from there it's been a relatively steady, uwavering course for over two hundred years. However the modern complex times we now live in have required modern complex thinking to address these increasingly complex times of increasingly complex thinking. To corraborate this analysis I have learned, from anonymous company sources close to the situation, that the company I work for (which will remain nameless to protect the innocent, but I will code name GM to assuage your curiosity) is implementing a new performance assessment program to help people navigate through these increasingly complex times of increasingly complex thinking. The new system is clearly an attempt to fix obviously manifested problems of rising morale resulting from a functioning simple performance appraisal system coupled with rumors of a company turnaround. Now it is well understood by HR professionals that the best way to remove your best employees (who also typically have the highest salary and therefore cause excess economic burden to the corporation) is not by direct denegration of their performance but by prolonged illogical actions. So a "new" three-by-three-by-three matrix system has been developed. It is a three square by three square with three colors (creatively colored red, yellow, and green) for each box, thus producing the highly complex cube. What is most encouraging about the potential of this new system to create the desired effect is that no longer are your undefined boxes colored by your supervisor, the one that should actually understand your performance, rather they are to be colored by the group decision of all the managers who you do not report to. A fictitious character named Jack Nicholson was used to help explain to 250 scientists and engineers the subtle nuances of how the new system would be applied to the performance of an Actor.

Being the high performer that I am, I have decided to create a stretch goal for myself to expand the three-by-three-by-three cube to a twenty-seven by twenty-seven matrix using only the colors white and blue to reduce printer costs associated with using the dye-sublimation color printers for three colors. My goal is to thoroughly understand the intricacies of the new personnel system such that one day before I am escorted out of the facility I will have my performance matrix appropriately colored with the letters GM to show my loyalty. Not wanting to be outdone, some Director of VP, will expand my twenty-seven by twenty-seven square matrix to some next logical size, say eighty-one by eighty-one to demonstrate their quest for perfection.

The lesson to be learned from this? It's not how well you perform, but how well you perform in showing how much you will exceed your original performance estimates.